The Woman He Loved Before (6 page)

Staring at my fingers stopped me from having to face him.

‘Well, I should probably tell you that I thought you were playing hide and seek,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t until I actually looked behind the door in the dining room that I realised how ridiculous I was being.’

I stretched my fingers, clenched and unclenched my hands, watching as the ligaments and muscles moved in them.

‘Was it really that bad?’ he asked so softly I barely heard him above the sound of the seagulls and the voices, chaos and lives from the main road, St James Street, around the corner. ‘I thought you’d—’

‘I did,’ I cut in before he said the word, but I still could not raise my gaze. ‘I did, you know I did. And you know it wasn’t bad at all.’

‘Then why did you leave? I was expecting to wake up with you this morning.’

‘I—I was ashamed of myself.’

‘What on Earth for?’

‘For doing that, enjoying it, when in the whole thing, I could have been anybody.’ I managed to look up, to finally look at the man I’d had sex with the night before. He had taken his sunglasses off and his eyes were focused intently on me. ‘It wasn’t about me or us or a special connection we had, was it? I was simply another body to fuck, another hole to fill.’

It was his turn to look down, to confirm my suspicions that
he’d done that, in that exact same way, a significant number of times. I quailed inside, thinking of how many women had put their hands where I had put my hands and had opened their legs for him as I had done. I tried not to wonder how many of them had stayed, had used the towels and dressing gown he had gone to get for me, had been secure enough in what they had done to go back for seconds.

‘Haven’t you ever had one-night stands before?’ he eventually asked, still with his eyes lowered.

‘Yeah,’ I said, looking down again. ‘And with some of them I didn’t realise they were going to be one-night stands until the person didn’t call. But none of them have ever felt as … calculated and soulless as last night.’ I undid then redid the blue jumper tied around my waist, which had been slowly working its way down my body. ‘We’d had such a nice night, I thought I’d been proved wrong about you, then we did that. I couldn’t stay and pretend it was OK with me because it wasn’t. I . . . I was ashamed of myself.’

We both continued to stare at the ground, unable to say anything that would heal the situation.

‘Do you want a hand with your shopping?’ he asked.

I shook my head, still staring at the ground, scared to look up in case he saw the tears that were building up behind my face, and were already sealing up my throat.

I heard him get up and pause for a moment, probably to put his sunglasses back on. He came down to the bottom step, stopped beside for me for a second. ‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured.

I nodded. I knew he was and turning up here was a brave thing to do. If it hadn’t all been so painful, I would have told him so. Instead, I stood still, my head bowed until I heard his car start up and drive away.

Tears slid slowly and continuously down my face as I picked up my shopping bags, ready to slip back into my life as if last night had never happened.

*

‘We’re going to have to go to theatre
now
, that bleed in her spleen seems to be getting worse and we need to get in there now if we’re going to save her.’

Are you sure it’s my spleen that’s bleeding?
I think
. Because I’ve always thought that it’s my heart that’s too soft and easily damaged. I’ve always thought that maybe I was born with a bleeding heart.

October, 2008

I became a beauty therapist because I couldn’t be a biochemist any more. Well, I could, if I decided that not eating or living with my parents were viable lifestyle choices.

I had emerged from university ready to save the world, hoping to find a way to make a difference. The research I had chosen to do wasn’t anywhere near the ‘hot topic’ it had become now; at the time no one cared if the move towards using biofuels (things like soya and corn in place of petrol) would adversely affect the world’s food resources and what we could do about it. And those who did care were not the people you financially got into bed with. So after a year of struggling to do what I wanted, I decided to stop. I didn’t want to find a job that was nearly but not quite in that area because what was the point? I wasn’t the sort of person who settled for second best, so I decided if I couldn’t do what was my real passion, I’d find a new passion. And that lay at the other end of the scale for my qualifications – beauty. It still involved chemistry and biology, indulged my love of make-up and lotions and potions, but I could train to do it in under a year, could continually train in new specialities and I would get paid in the here and now.

The surprising thing was that I loved it. I mean, really loved it. I loved the chemical analysis of finding the right products for a person’s skin, the science-like methodology of any treatment or process. I also loved seeing the results on people’s faces when they looked in the mirror and saw what I saw when I worked on them – not the imperfections, but all the perfections that made up who they were.

Being a beauty therapist had many perks – being taken seriously by the world was not one of them. I saw the ‘idiot’ label flash up on people’s faces when they spotted the beautician’s coat. They thought I didn’t have more than two brain cells to rub together, and that I sat around filing my nails and thinking about make-up all day. Who was I to shatter their illusions?

Who was I to point out that to be a successful qualified, certified beauty therapist you needed to understand the human body, understand chemistry and know how to successfully communicate with people? Who was I to explain to them that when you were faced with poverty or wearing a beautician’s uniform, the uniform would win every time? Anyone who said they would rather starve than do a job like mine, hadn’t been poor enough, hadn’t had to make – more than once – the choice between food and heat. Choices like that focused the mind and hardened the heart to any sneers you might get from people who didn’t know you.

Except possibly when you were crouched behind the life-sized wooden cutout of a female lifeguard holding a male swimmer at the entrance to Brighton Pier, clutching your bag to your chest and praying against hope that the man you had a one-night stand with nearly three months ago didn’t see you turn and run here the second you spotted him coming towards you. When you were doing something like that, everyone looked at you as if you were strange, beautician’s uniform or not.

I’d seen Jack several times in the past few weeks and I always ducked into a shop or crossed the road to avoid the possibility of having to acknowledge or – worse – speak to him, hoping while I did so that he hadn’t seen me. This was the first time I’d had nowhere to run to, though, so had been forced to do this. Or to put my hands over my eyes like Benji used to do when he was two, because he thought no one could see him if he couldn’t see them.

‘I think you probably win the award for the most inventive way to avoid talking to me,’ Jack said.

I froze, wondering if it was too late to try the hands-over-my-eyes thing. Slowly, I uncurled myself and stood upright. Jack and I sighed at the same time, both of us frustrated but for different reasons.

‘Look, Libby, can’t you just talk to me? It doesn’t sit right with me that we don’t speak when we’ve …’ He didn’t need to say it because we both knew what we’d done.

‘Doesn’t bother me,’ I fibbed.

‘It bothers me, a lot. I’ve seen you cross the street and throw yourself into shops to avoid me. I want to make things right.’

‘There’s nothing to make right. We did what we did and we just have to pretend it didn’t happen.’ I chanced a look at him. As I did so, I flashed back to his face in the mirror a moment before he told me he wanted to fuck me and I cringed, and refocused my eyes on wooden slats of the pier floor.

‘But it did.’

‘And for you it happened with a lot of other people – do you hound every one of them?’

‘I have no need to because I still speak to them.’

‘You mean, when you’re in need of …’

‘No!’ he said sharply. ‘I don’t mean that at all. I mean we exchange conversation if we pass in the street.’

‘Why is it so important that I speak to you?’ I asked. ‘What difference does it make to anything?’

‘Why is it so important that you don’t speak to me?’ he asked, obviously thinking if he turned it round on me I might change my mind or something.

‘I told you why: speaking to you, seeing you reminds me of something I’d rather forget. I’m still ashamed about what I did.’

He stood in silence for a while. ‘Look, walk with me down to the end of the pier and while we walk, tell me everything that is wrong with what happened between us. I won’t talk, I won’t interrupt or try to justify myself, I’ll simply listen, and you can purge yourself of that night. Hopefully it’ll be cathartic, and if
afterwards you still don’t want to speak to me, I’ll respect that. I’ll walk past you in the street like you’re a stranger. What do you say?’

‘Libby, I’m going to be right here, waiting,’ Jack tells me. ‘I’m not going anywhere. You’re going to be fine and I’ll see you afterwards.’

October, 2008

‘I’ve lost my bet. And won my bet as well,’ Jack said to me, as we leaned on the railings halfway along the pier.

The length of the pier wasn’t long enough to talk about what we were talking about. It was an unusually warm October, even this late in the day, so there was only a slight edge of coolness to the air, which allowed us to stand by the railings, watching the waters swirl below as we talked.

‘Bet with who?’

‘Myself. I bet myself that I would be able to get through this without doing something to mess it up.’

‘You haven’t done anything to mess up.’ He had been impressively attentive while I had tried to explain how bad I’d felt that we’d had great sex that was so impersonal. Once I started talking, I realised that it was difficult to convey what I felt without bringing up the fact we didn’t kiss. Theoretically, I could have kissed him (even though there didn’t seem to be the opportunity) so, logically, it was my own stupid fault. But I was feeling distinctly illogical about it and had no idea why I was so hung up on a kiss. It was illogical, but vital. I still hadn’t managed to get that across.

‘I’m about to,’ he said, and leant in towards me, his eyes closing as he came nearer. Millimetres away from me he paused, giving me the opportunity to move, then he continued and touched my lips with his. I closed my eyes as our bodies automatically moved closer and our lips crushed together. His hand slid into my hair, while the other rested on the base of my spine
as I slowly parted my lips to let his tongue carefully and tenderly slip into my mouth. For a few minutes, or was it seconds, our lips moved together and everything around us was still as we kissed. This was what was missing from that night. This was what I hadn’t been able to articulate.

He pulled away first, then stood back staring at my mouth as he said, ‘See, told you.’

‘I repeat, you haven’t done anything to mess up.’ I was trembling slightly. I’d never trembled after a kiss before, but there really was something about Jack that touched parts of me that I didn’t know existed.

He put his fingertips on his lips, as though checking they were still on his face. ‘You’re the second woman I’ve kissed on the mouth in over three years,’ he stated. ‘The other one was my wife. My late wife. She died three years ago.’

‘Wife? You have a late wife? Why didn’t you mention that when we went out?’

He looked down at his hands, twisting the simple gold band on the ring finger of his right hand around and around. His wedding ring. Of course! That was why it looked so incongruous with the rest of him and the way he dressed.

‘Telling someone about your dead wife isn’t exactly the best way to charm them, is it?’

‘I guess not. Is that why you have sex like that?’ I asked.

He kept touching his lips, almost as if they were tender, hurt, damaged from kissing properly after so long.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I could pretend that’s only just occurred to me, or I could pretend that in my grief I’m not that self aware, but neither of those things are the case. Yes, that’s why I have sex like that. I like sex, but kissing as we’ve just done would feel like I’m cheating on her. Cheating on Eve. That was her name. It’s still her name, actually. Her name didn’t change because she isn’t here any more.’

‘Sounds like she’s still a big part of your life.’

‘In some ways.’

‘You could pay for sex, you know. I hear they have sex without kissing.’

He fixed me with a serious look as he shook his head. ‘No, I couldn’t. Maybe other men can, but I can’t. Can you imagine me trying to strike up friendships with people who’ve only looked at me because I’ve paid them?’

‘I suppose so. I’ve never really thought through the finer details of all that before.’

‘Don’t bother, it’ll only upset you in one way or another if you do. I know it did me when I thought about it. I’ve done some appalling things in the last three years because almost everyone I know has let me get away with it, basically. At first, I genuinely didn’t realise I was behaving badly because I was so consumed with grief, and everyone accepted that. As the fog cleared, I realised what I was doing and still no one said, “Enough, stop that!”. So, I carried on. Getting that little bit worse each time to see if someone would say, “No”. Not one person said it meaningfully until you.’